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Is There a Doctor in the House? Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis January 13, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Nehemiah 7:73b-8:6 Matthew 9:9-13
If you have begun the year resolved to read through the New Testament (a much less daunting resolution than the promise made last year and kept in the breach by many of us to read through the Old Testament), by now you are a handful of chapters into Matthew’s gospel, having spent the week on a mountaintop rereading Jesus’ first sermon. “Blessed,” the sermon begins and you know, in some inextricable sense, you are home. Yet hearing, really hearing Jesus after centuries of domestication is not easy. At the start of the sermon, his words sound winsome to our way of believing: blessed are the poor in spirit, them that mourn, the meek, and so on and so forth. Cross-stitched on samplers and recast happily into self-help books, the cutting edge of the beatitudes has been blunted by the sentimental excess of nice Christians down the ages. Nevertheless, I wonder if our being drawn into Jesus’ sermon uncritically at the beginning of Matthew’s gospel may have been and still is what Jesus intended. For once we are taken in, it is as if this Teacher knows he has us by the heartstrings and so ups the ethical ante: “You have heard it said, ‘You shall not murder….’ But I say to you that if you are angry…. You have heard it said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that looking with lust….It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces….’ But I say to you anyone who divorces…commits adultery. You have heard it said, ‘An eye for an eye….’ But I say to you, Do not resist…turn the other cheek…go the second mile. You have heard it said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemy.” Who can stand on anything but God’s grace? Apparently there are many these days, though I am getting ahead of myself. Matthew tells us that Jesus is preaching on the mountain to his disciples (who are not yet the choir!). That would include at the start of Jesus’ public ministry Simon Peter, Andrew, James the son of Zebedee and his brother John, all of whom were fishermen. But by the end of the sermon Matthew reports that there were crowds who were astonished; that is to say fearful at his teaching, because he taught not like the scribes but as one who had authority. In other words, the crowds knew--in a way words cannot contain--that in him and so before the prospect of his impossible ethic, they had to do with God. The make up of the crowd that day was anybody’s guess except to say, in the context of the characters we soon will meet in this gospel and in the context of those who crowd around him still today, the masses were made up of human beings who inhabited two radically different moral universes. On the one hand, there was and is the universe inhabited by those already a part of God’s party. As Steven Pinker notes in an article about evolutionary psychology and the neurobiology of morality in today’s New York Times Magazine, human beings have “the nasty habit of always putting the self on the side of the angels.” Throughout his gospel Matthew’s shorthand for the inhabitants of this moral universe will be “the scribes and Pharisees” as well as the lawyers. His point has to do not with a particular race of God’s people but with a righteous self-understanding that has no need of God’s help. In part, these are the theological descendants of the exiles returned from Babylon who listened to Ezra rehearse the Law of Moses at the Watergate. As novelist Michael Dorris imagines in an essay on Nehemiah and Matthew, the ancestors of Matthew’s scribes and Pharisees were told: “You may not recognize this place you have arrived, but it is where you came from and where you should be. Pay close heed because this is how God wants you to act when you’re not taking orders from someone else but are in charge of what you do….You have a fresh chance to be good. There will be no opportunity for questions, no deep analysis, just the facts as they have been revealed to and reported by your predecessors, who accumulated this data at great cost. Now stand still and listen up.” Truth be told, the same moral universe seamlessly became the moral universe of Christians except that neither blood nor grace secured membership in this new iteration of God’s party: a person’s inclusion eternally in God’s Christian party became conditional upon his or her better behavior. Just so Dorris recalls his Roman Catholic childhood, “Without so much as leaving my seat I was capable of condemning myself to Hades by mentally cursing God, whatever that meant. With a sentence or two of malevolent conversation I could give scandal, tell a lie, be disrespectful to my mother, or use the Lord’s name in vain. By touching my body in the wrong spot or in the wrong way or at the wrong time I could make the Blessed Virgin cry. By looking at a condemned film, reading a book listed on The Index, listening to an agnostic speech, or drinking consecrated wine, I could buy a one-way everlasting ticket to The Bad Place.” And lest we Protestants place ourselves smugly on the elected side of the angels in opposition to the Roman regulation of Christian behavior, remember the Blue Laws, the prohibition of dancing and cards and movies: our own compendium of “thou shalt nots” sanctioned from on high and meant to dress not only Christians but the whole culture in a one size fits all moral strait-jacket for Christ’s sake. Of course, notes Pinker, the matters about which a culture moralizes shift from age to age. “Much of our recent social history, including the culture wars between liberals and conservatives, consists of the moralization or amoralization of particular kinds of behavior.” Moreover, “there seems to be a Law of Conservation of Moralization,” says Pinker, “so that as old behaviors are taken out of the moralized column, new ones are added to it.” Were the Sermon on the Mount to be taken as a case in point illustrating the Law of the Conservation of Moralization, one might expect Jesus to come down the mountain carrying a significantly edited but no less rigorous set of tablets at the beginning of his ministry. But apparently he does not! Once back in the valley of the shadow, he touches a leper and heals him; he speaks to a Centurion, a gentile, and cures his son; he feels the forehead of Peter’s mother, likely during that time of the month, I think, and lifts her fever; he spends the evening with people possessed by demons and racked by disease; he forgives the sins of an unrepentant paralytic. This is clearly not a man interested in being extra specially good as God’s party has prescribed the good; it is a man whose nature is to show mercy and thereby to reveal to sinners the living God. Why else would he next call a tax collector into his inner circle? The encounter had about it a casual air, though it was not by chance that Jesus called a tax collector--from out of the company of those who inhabit the other moral universe--to follow him. The gospel writer’s shorthand for the inhabitants of this other universe will be “publicans and sinners.” “It is not clear,” says New Testament scholar Douglas Hare, “whether these [sinners] were people who were thought guilty of flagrant moral offenses [the Sopranos, say] or people whose sin consisted primarily in [lax observance] of the food laws, tithes and ritual baths [Presbyterians, for instance]. Recently it has been proposed that the ‘sinners’ were people whose very profession constituted a violation of Torah, such as bankers, whose business involved lending at interest.” In this latter sense, Matthew belonged to a profession that, by definition, made him a sinner “before the Law and in the eyes of its commissioned expositors and representatives,” said Karl Barth. “The collection of taxes was a lucrative business, farmed out by the alien rulers to large-scale operators who then committed it to lesser middlemen” such as Matthew who, in turn, got rich on the backs of fellow Jews. This is the middle manager in my mortgage company—Countrywide—who has taken to the bank the perks he received for convincing the economically marginal [and now the increasingly broke and homeless] to buy a house they could never afford. In essence, Jesus calls the telemarketing guy from Countrywide who, given a chance, would probably try to convince Jesus to take out a home equity loan at an attractive introductory rate: “After all, you have no place to lay your head and you deserve one!” “It is astonishing enough,” says Barth, “that Jesus calls a notorious publican to be His disciple. But this may be condoned on the natural assumption that He is calling him out of the great company of [the]…ungodly and leading him into [God’s] camp. To make proselytes has always been a fine occupation for the righteous. Yet this is not what happens.” What happens is that Jesus follows Matthew! He goes straightaway to his house, sits down and begins to eat and drink with people Matthew simply identifies as sinners: that is to say, with people decidedly not on the side of the angels. Why? In a word, they have need of him. They are morally wounded; their desire for mercy is immense; their exclusion from polite society undeniable. Only those convinced they will never behave well enough, be good enough to deserve God’s love are the ones who alone can proclaim the fact of God’s amazing grace. Likewise the righteous are the very last people who can bear witness to grace undeserved since they have convinced themselves they deserve that and more! I have no doubt the writer of this gospel--likely a Jewish Christian living in Antioch writing a good fifty years after the resurrection--inhabits the same moral universe as the tax collector. His gospel is a gospel for those who believe they have no chance in hell for heaven! His gospel is for you and for me. He wants us to get that we are sinners—not in the hellfire and brimstone sense but in the sense of being without God in the world. He sees, whether we do or not, that we are publicans at heart—not in the repent or else you are going to The Bad Place way, but in the “just as I am without one plea” sort of deep need of grace which alone bears witness to God’s grace in the world. He is rooting for us to be rejected by the righteous religious establishment—not because God would thereby judge us but because Christ’s love can only take up residence in the undefended spirit. He would have us believe ourselves to be beneath God’s mercy and grace so that in the company of the despised and rejected, we may hear Christ’s call to sinners…to those who reside morally in the company of folks who have nothing to lose…and follow Him. In truth, my friends, I think most of us have one foot in both moral universes. To put it in the somewhat banal but recognizable world of the twenty-first century, when it comes to “not driving a gas-guzzling Hummer…but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo” we do believe we are the side of the angels. Our morals line up pretty neatly with our lifestyle. But when the lights are out and no one is listening unless there be a God, we know ourselves to be the sin sick souls we really are at the end of the day, whose only hope hangs on a doctor that might still make house calls. The gospel we are given in Matthew is simply this: there is and he does! Thanks be to God. |